Saturday, August 3
Our big problem this morning was trying to figure out where to eat breakfast. There’s a Waffle House right next door and a Cracker Barrel just across the street. Such problems!
After breakfast at Waffle House we headed to The Hermitage, the home of President Andrew Jackson. We got tickets for the General’s Tour, which included everything but the horse drawn carriage based tour of the grounds (we walked). Tickets were $22.00 per person. This includes an audio guide.
The tour starts in a modern building where you can sit through a 20 minute introductory film. That leads to a museum that has displays about his entire life including his participation in the Revolutionary War at the age of 13, his military career, his purchase and transformation of the property, his life in State and National politics as well as his controversial marriage to his wife Rachel (when they married Rachel was not yet legally divorced from her first husband – a controversy that his political opponents brought to the fore whenever possible).
The house is about a quarter of a mile away. All along the way there are places to stop and listen to a description of how the plantation would have appeared when he was in residence. Guides take you through the house, explain the functions of the various rooms and answer all of your questions. Virtually the entire house can be seen. Apparently there are more original artifacts in this house than in Mount Vernon and Monticello combined.
Outside you can see the outbuildings with the assistance of the audio guides. The audio guide will also take you along a paved walkway to some of the other buildings of interest including the original, wooden house, the pump house and slaves quarters.
(Andrew and Rachel’s Tombs in the Garden)
We watched two demonstrations. One was a description of how Jackson raced horses and one was about how duels were fought. Both were interesting and intended to illustrate how things were done in the 19th Century.
As usual we took our time, read every sign, toured every building and saw everything there was to see. We spent a little over four hours in the process and had a great time. My one regret is that the house is positioned in such a way that it’s impossible to get a decent photograph of the beautiful, Greek Revival exterior.
Our next stop was at the Parthenon!? Yes, there is a full sized replica of the Parthenon here in Nashville, TN. It was originally built in 1897 in celebration of Nashville’s centenary (Nashville at that time considered itself to be a very cultural place and was nicknamed the Athens of the South) and is the centerpiece of Centennial Park. The building has sustained damage over the years and has been heavily reconstructed several times. Today the building serves as an art museum. Entry costs $6.00 per person. Having been in Athens recently we were really excited to see this building.
(The Nashville Parthenon)
In order to save money the exterior was made from a brown-ish cement rather than white marble. It was said that the brown color matches the color of aged marble, but that’s going a little too far. The pediments and friezes have all been reconstructed to look as the building would have when it was new (no one knows exactly what it looked like but there are many written accounts of its appearance).
You enter into the basement level through the East portico. There is a display about the centennial celebration and how the building was used. As you go further into the building there is an art collection. Most of the artists were Americans and the works date from the early 1900s until the present. Only a few of the works were interesting so we went through this part of the building rather quickly. The works were lit directly with harsh lights that made photography very difficult.
Next we followed the staircase upstairs to the ground level, entered a large chamber and came face-to-face with a full sized reproduction of Phidias’ Athena Parthenos. The original has been lost to time but there was an almost contemporary model in the Archeological Museum in Athens. We compared our photo to the version on display; it was a very high quality copy. As in the original Parthenon there was a room behind the statue. In antiquity only the priests would have been allowed inside. The museum had a large display of both the East and West Pediments and copies of the actual pieces known to exist.
(Athena Parthenos)
The rest of the park contains a pond frequented by ducks, a nice commemorative display about how Tennessee cast the deciding vote for Women’s Suffrage and some other statues. It’s a nice place to spend some time walking around on a sunny day.
A few interesting things to note…
- The motel where we are currently staying made up our room this afternoon.
- The Check Engine Light in our car went off.